ABSTRACT How do racial signals associating a candidate with minority supporters change voters’ perceptions about a candidate and their support for a candidate? Given the presence of competing information in any campaign or the absence of information in low-salience campaigns, voters may rely on heuristics – such as race – to make the process of voting easier. The information communicated by these signals may be so strong that they cause voters to ignore other, perhaps more politically relevant, information. In this paper, we test how associative racial cues sway voters’ perceptions of and support for candidates using two experiments that harness real-world print and audio campaign advertisements. We find that the signals in these ads can sometimes overwhelm cues about policy positions when the two are present together. Moreover, we find that such signals have limited effects on candidate support among Black voters but that they risk substantial backlash of up to eight percentage points in reported vote intention among White voters. Our results highlight how voters gather and use information in low-information elections and demonstrate the power of campaign communication strategies that use racial associations.

中文翻译：

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联想种族暗示在选举中的作用

摘要 将候选人与少数族裔支持者联系起来的种族信号如何改变选民对候选人的看法以及他们对候选人的支持？鉴于在任何竞选活动中都存在竞争信息，或者在低显着性竞选活动中缺乏信息，选民可能会依靠启发式方法（例如种族）来简化投票过程。这些信号传达的信息可能非常强大，以至于选民会忽略其他可能与政治相关的信息。在本文中，我们使用两个利用真实世界印刷和音频竞选广告的实验来测试关联种族线索如何影响选民对候选人的看法和支持。我们发现，当两者同时出现时，这些广告中的信号有时会压倒有关政策立场的暗示。而且，我们发现这些信号对黑人选民的候选人支持影响有限，但在白人选民报告的投票意愿中，它们可能会出现高达 8 个百分点的大幅反弹。我们的结果突出了选民如何在低信息选举中收集和使用信息，并展示了使用种族关联的竞选沟通策略的力量。